tritium

Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

n. A rare radioactive hydrogen isotope with atomic mass 3 and half-life 12.5 years, prepared artificially for use as a tracer and as a constituent of hydrogen bombs.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

n. A radioactive isotope of the element hydrogen, (symbol T or 31H), having one proton and two neutrons.

n. An atom of this isotope.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English

n. A radioactive isotope of hydrogen having one proton and two neutrons in the nucleus. It decays spontaneously to Helium-3 by the emission of an electron (beta ray), with a half-life of 12.3 years. Symbol 1H3. Atomic weight 3.01605 (C-12 = 12.0000). It is one of the radioisotopes commonly used to label chemical compounds for use as tracers in biochemistry and chemistry. It is also used as one of the fusionable components of a hydrogen bomb.

Last July, months before most Vermonters had heard the word tritium, Gundersen was poring over a Nuclear Regulatory Commission report when a mention of underground pipes at Vermont Yankee caught his attention.

Since this is only the world's largest nuke complex, with only seven reactors on site, and only several hundred barrels of nuke waste tipped over, and far fewer had their lids fly off, and the gas emissions the utility lied about were only tritium, which is less deadly than plutonium, the fact that all of Japan was not engulfed in a catastrophic radiation release (yet) will be used to sell more reactors.

He said the Legislature has been studying Yankee-related issues carefully for several years, and the urgency was created by the recent disclosure that pipes at the plant were leaking a chemical called tritium and management misled lawmakers about that fact.